Thanks for letting me know Billy , have you thought of trying the indirect method of making charcoal ? you have the perfect set up there for doing so , and all you need is another short length of stove pipe and some insulation , and your yield rate will increase a fair amount ,and you would not need to change anything more .
Dave

I was going to use a clamshell for mine with mineral wool insulation. But I didn’t do it, because I wasn’t sure how to keep it dry if it rained.

The hornito used a 55 gallon barrel where they cut it and added 1/3rd of another barrel (lengthwise) to it then put a new top on it which gave it like a 2" gap around the barrel.

You have the lift so it might be a lot easier for you to slice and dice a few barrels then weld them. Then you use the lift to drop it right over the char barrel. You could put insulation on the inside (provided you left enough space ie you might have to use a half a barrel), but it may not be needed. that way you aren’t losing heat if you only run 1 barrel. I think you will lose more hot heat if you try to share the heat between barrels, unless you have another purpose for the large clamshell.

Dad didn’t do much on this one. A couple of words of advice is all. (sorry for the delayed response)

Jakob is all smiles today after he got his machine back up and running. I reported in another post that as he loaded it on the trailer to come to Argos, the collar on his driveshaft came apart. He spent most of the night up working on it, he got it together this afternoon. Somehow when he rearranged his gasifier unit it changed something, and now his light-to-running time is under a minute.

Hey guys, I have a question. Last week we were using the tractor’s cyclone, filter, & blower to test that new wood gasifier we built. A couple times after that when I tried to run charcoal for demonstrations the throttle plate would be stuck. We didn’t have a lot of time to fix it right away so I would spray a little carb cleaner in it to get it going quickly and go on. I figured had made some tar with the wood gasifier and it made it’s way into my carb. or that I had made some charcoal that wasn’t cooked quite well enough.

The other day when I removed the carb to clean it out, I found no tar at all. Only aluminum oxide-like substance had stuck the rod for the butterfly in the aluminum housing. It seems like acid corrosion. My guess is that the woodgas we made and ran through the cyclone and filters was acidic in a way that my chargas is not. I am no longer using the system for the woodgas. I have some questions.

My question is:

Is this accurate?

what do I need to do to get it to stop happening? Is there something I need to use to clean everything out so it doesn’t keep corroding?

Jakob I have the same thing with my charcoal lawn tractor and I never fed it Woodgas. I think my softwood charcoal is corrosive. I think I will make my own carb out of steel so I don’t have to worry about aluminum.

I have this with my throttle body carberation burning oak woodgas. Inspected everything and decided it was NOT creosote sticking things. Had lots of white power material (?) in the tb. Cleaned it good with carburetor cleaner and it didn’t cut it, but it made the sticking business worse. I would press the accelerator each morning and try to break it lose without bending/ breaking anything. Sometimes it was so bad I had to take the air cleaner off and tap the linkage with a hammer to break it loose. I would go in and work the pedal to make sure it was working and take off. Next day same thing. Each day it got a little better. Now if it sticks int the morning I pump the pedal or if necessary, hammer the linkage. No solution, I just live with it. Maybe one of the chemist can confirm Chris’s thought. TomC

I have always had this issue on engines running stock carbs , its worse if you leave the engine sat for a few days since the last run , the issue is always between the carb body that is alu and the butterfly pin that is steel and seated into the alu body , the corrosion between the two metals is the problem i think , so on shut down now, when i am not going to be using it for a while i just give it a squirt of the best anti seize i have come across and thats a 50/50 mix of trans fluid and acetone i keep in a small spray bottle its worth your while using this formula for anything that is seized .
WD40 would help at a pinch if you have that handy .
Dave
I have also found that it helps a lot if you use aluminum mesh and pan scrubbers in your filter house so as to get more of this corrosive acid out of the gas stream before it reaches the engine

the carb on the tea 20 never stuck. The carb on the small engines always did. I squirt some gas in through the air intake at shutdown on the small engines now or run a minute on dino. I like the alum shavings idea…

Hi David , what i used for my aluminum were the old filters that come out of a cooker range hood , they are great for what i need , i just cut them with tin snips to the shape of my filter container in the sandwich they are made up of are various mesh sizes .

Hi Jacob,
I found quite a lot of that white stuff on my Rabbit pickup’s throttle plates. I think with a tiny cooler too much moisture in the woodgas was speeding up the process. It got to the point where one the plates corroded enough to brake and the Rabbit actually ate a piece of it with a burp